This one looks like it may be a winner from Intel:
New Intel Portable Dazzles
ASSOCIATED PRESS
HILLSBORO, Ore. (AP) -- You may not be able to take a moon shuttle
or spend a night in space like characters in the movie "2001: A
Space Odyssey," but the kind of thin computer pad they carried could
be on shelves by the real 2001.
Intel Corp., the world's largest chip maker, is testing a device about
the size of an Etch-a-Sketch that taps into the Internet without a wire
and can be passed around the house from husband to wife to kid to
check the latest headlines, e-mail, stock quotes and even the school
lunch menu.
"They'll have to come out here and pry it out of my hands," said
Katherine Cowan, whose suburban Portland family recently tested a
prototype that designers based loosely on the "newspad" in the
classic 1968 movie.
She praised the convenience of a computer that can be carried from
room to room and "held in your lap like a book or a newspaper."
"Rather than having to go upstairs, start the computer, log onto the
provider and do a search, I could be on the Internet anywhere in the
house," she said. "I could do it on the phone, I could do it while I was
cooking, I could sit on the patio and have a glass of wine."
Intel Web Pad, which will sell for about $500, has a completely
different audience than the newspads portrayed in the Stanley
Kubrick film.
"If you think about 2001, you have these cute little devices, but who's
using them? It's the scientists, it's the engineers," said Walter
Bender, assistant director of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology media lab.
"Just the fact that these devices are consumer products now is so
different from the vision of 2001, and it's so different from what
people's expectations were even a decade ago," Bender said. "The
computer has way outstripped the imagination of people in the '60s,
even people like Kubrick."
The leader of the Intel development team that created the Web Pad
says it was designed to be simple as possible to use, yet fast,
durable with plenty of advanced features that match a desktop
computer -- without being stuck in one room.
"It's how people live in their homes, how they communicate," said Ed
Arrington of the Intel Architecture Lab, one of the Oregon divisions of
the Santa Clara, Calif.-based chip maker.
"We try not to position ourselves as too 'out there,"' Arrington said.
"This is more real."
Industry analysts doubt the Web Pad will replace the desktop
computer, noting the test homes had to be wired for a radio
connection between the pad and a desktop machine with a
dedicated phone line that gave it round-the-clock access to the
Internet. Also, there is no keyboard, but users can call up an image
of a keyboard to type with a special pen.
"People talk about the age of the conventional PC being over, but I
don't think that's true," said Kurt Scherf, a home network analyst for
Parks Associates in Dallas.
The popularity of the device will depend as much on Internet access
and security as the technology that goes into the Web Pad, added
Alexis Gerard, publisher of The Future Image Report, in San Mateo, Calif.
If Internet speed and capacity improves as fast, Gerard says people
will buy something that can call up a digital photo of their
grandchildren as quickly it can find a recipe for pesto sauce.
"We were still trying to figure out how to use the computer before the
Web came along," Gerard said. "But that changed the way people looked at the computer, and the way they communicated with each other." |
